Rare Books and Rarer People : Some Personal Reminiscences of "The Trade"

Werner Shaw, London, first edition, 1982. Cloth, tall 8vo, 25 cm,. x, [1], 256 pp, [16] leaves of plates. From the blurb: "Rich men, poor men, beggar-men and thieves - sooner or later they all drift into the auction room. For thirty-two book sale seasons O.F. Snelling sat at his raised vantage-point at the rostrum of Hodgson's and Sotheby's; he advised and observed them all. In 1949 the author secured the position of Sales Clerk with Hodgson's Rooms in Chancery Lane, and it was with Hodgson's that most of his working life was spent. He retired from Sotheby's late in 1981. This is not an autobiography; it is an account of the quite extraordinary characters encountered by O.F. Snelling during his business life. They form an odd and motley gathering. Old Jim, 70 years with Hodgson's, diminutive in stature but a giant in his hatred of books; Potty, the miserly eccentric dealer whose private collection of early-printed books realised £200,000 at Sotheby's after he died; Isaac Foot, father of Michael, who could hardly drag himself away from the auction room; Peter and Helen Kroger, who used bookselling as a front to their spying activities in collaboration with book collector Gordon Lonsdale, master-mind of what came to be known as the Portland Spy Ring. Not since Fred Bason's Diary has there been such a popular book on the second-hand and rare book trade for the general reader. As one of O. F. Spelling's former editors wrote: 'He paints his past acquaintances in the auction game with the skill of a caricaturist and the charm of a bom raconteur'. Very Good in Very Good dustwrapper.